By Dmytro Spilka, Contributor
Embracing digital transformation and utilizing a digital ordering system can provide greater levels of convenience for your restaurant with better efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Digital channels have the power to reach more devices on a far broader scale, helping your restaurant’s brand to increase its customer footprint without the necessity of digital expansion or relocation.
Another key impact of digital ordering for restaurants is the opportunity to capture your customers in a more effective way and build stronger relationships with them through personalization.
Through leveraging advanced machine learning and real-time data, digital ordering platforms can be an incisive tool when it comes to brand loyalty and customer retention. Still, some restaurant owners are resisting digital transformation and its benefits.
Taking the next step in readying your restaurant or food delivery service for digital ordering can come with many benefits. Is it time that you embraced digital efficiency? Let’s explore its transformative effect on your business.
Gives Power to Guests with Omnichannel Ordering
Omnichannel ordering can help restaurants empower their customers to choose exactly how to pay and receive their food.
The beauty of omnichannel ordering is that it can act as a powerful tool in providing inventory management. The technology can track customer order history in a way that can identify trends and customer insights surrounding different dishes to help optimize your menus.
Going omnichannel helps to transcend delivery options and can provide customers with multiple options when it comes to paying bills. For instance, tabletop payment methods help to leverage more flexibility when it comes to paying bills and can offer debit card payments, mobile solutions, and far faster turnover rates.
Uncovers Customer Insights
As we touched on in the previous point. Customer insights can be a key asset when implementing digital ordering solutions for your food business.
Ordering trends can be leveraged to make strategic decisions about menu offers, pricing, and future promotions. This allows your restaurant to tailor its business to meet the more frequent wants and needs of its clientele.
Additionally, it’s possible to see which menu options are best aligned with your brand identity, helping you to create a digital presence that strikes the right balance with your target audience.
Removes Human Error from Ordering
Crucially, digital ordering systems can remove the many instances of human error that can occur for restaurants operating with a call-in ordering system or more rudimentary ordering technology.
Factors like bad connections, background noise, miscommunications, and delivery errors can all come into play and create negative experiences that risk losing customers for good.
Digital ordering systems, however, can help businesses to fulfil orders more efficiently with automated processes that bypass the prospect of human error in recording and relaying the relevant information to kitchen staff.
Opens the Door to Loyalty Programs
Another advantage of going digital is that you can launch a customer loyalty program that’s capable of encouraging more customer retention and operational sustainability.
There are many ways in which you can set up a loyalty program, such as offering discounts for group orders, freebies for every 10th or 5th order, gamification prizes for collecting loyalty points, and much more.
You can also reward customer loyalty in a similar way to DoorDash, by optimizing your menu to display frequently purchased items, or by displaying favorites based on their ordering history.
These loyalty programs can be great for generating more repeat customers. Because restaurant customer acquisition costs can be high, growing your opportunities to retain loyal customers is an excellent cost-effective way to build sustainability.
Adapt Your Menu for Digital Optimization
Utilizing digital ordering and welcoming higher volumes of orders to be delivered means that restaurants could face fresh challenges.
Some foods simply don’t travel well, while others are perfectly portable for customers to comfortably eat out of the box, should they want to.
With this in mind, embracing digital ordering requires a level of adaptability. Think about the food you serve and what you can send out. You may need to adapt your menu for digital orders to handle the load better, or trim the food you offer to customer favorites that can be eaten at home.
This process can be a learning curve, but it’s important to avoid delivering foods that could be impractical enough to leave negative customer reviews.
Taking Your Capabilities to New Levels
Buoyed by digital transformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital ordering systems have become an excellent way to grow your customer base and leverage more sales.
In setting up an adaptive digital menu, you can make your processes stretch further with efficient ordering, enhanced payment options, new online audiences, and even the prospect of incentivized loyalty schemes.
Digital ordering is a brave new frontier for the world of food and drink, and it’s fast becoming an essential way to grow the presence of your restaurant online.
